164. Getting The Second Coming Wrong Part 2 (Historical Blunders)

The PRODCAST

Subscribe

Download

Share

00

00:00

All of this was fulfilled in 80 70 when the son of man came in judgment, just as he promised and he dismantled the old covenant and he enthroned his unstoppable kingdom.

00:12

But nobody preached that Schofield didn't preach that. Lindsay didn't print that.

00:18

Why is it not? Didn't calculate that. Lahaye didn't imagine that. And so the 20th century became the most delusional and destructive and globally exported chapter of eschatological error in all of church history.

00:38

Hello everyone and welcome back to the podcast where we prod the sheep and beat the wolf. This is episode one 64 getting the second coming wrong part two.

01:12

Well hello everyone and welcome back to the podcast. Last week we showed our cards and we flipped over the table of revelation one seven through eight and we showed how it's not about our future.

01:26

It's not about skydiving Jesus coming down and interrupting a CNN broadcast returning to rescue all of the bunker bound church members.

01:35

It's about his covenant judgment on apostate Israel in the first century.

01:41

It's about the generation that pierced him. It's about the clouds of wrath, not cumulus fluff.

01:49

It's about the fall of Jerusalem and it's not about the end of the physical cosmos.

01:54

And if that left you shaken, well, today's episode is going to hopefully finish the job because we're not just going to prove that futurism is wrong.

02:03

We're going to show you where it's been wrong and how it has cost the church, at least from a reputational standpoint.

02:11

This is today is going to be where theology meets the bloodshed. It's going to be where we see how twisting one single verse revelation one seven leads to all kinds of global embarrassment, a disfigured mission and 2000 years of apocalyptic face plants.

02:32

False prophecy isn't just bad math. It's bad shepherding.

02:37

It's stolen away our hope. It's paralyzed their pulpits and it's made a victorious church look like a refugee camp that's waiting on air support.

02:48

It's made us look like Saigon waiting on the helicopter to lift us out of here. So today we're going to be fighting against that.

02:56

We're going to be lighting a match in the middle of a graveyard and we're going to be walking through and talking through the long humiliating record of failed second coming prophecies throughout history.

03:09

We're going to be talking about names, dates, disasters and all sorts of other shenanigans that have spawned over church history.

03:17

And I'm hoping that as we see that you're going to see what happens when you rip a time sensitive passage out of its first century context and you try to shove it into your time period, your world.

03:30

We've been doing that for 2000 years and it's time that we stop. So with that, let's begin with the rubble and let's begin by jumping into part one, the first thousand years.

03:45

Now the early church gave us creeds and councils and courageous martyrs and, but they also gave us a blooper reel of eschatological disasters for every theological high point.

03:57

There was also a doomsday face plant and the moment that the church stopped reading revelation one seven as a time bound covenant, it's a warning to first century

04:07

Judah. Well, she began producing a 2000 year parade of prophetic pitfalls.

04:16

It began fittingly in 80 66 with a group called the S scenes. They were a separatist

04:22

Jewish sect that retreated into the Judean wilderness when Roman legions began marching towards Jerusalem and the

04:29

S scenes strapped on their apocalyptic goggles and they minted their own little messianic coins and they shouted, this is it.

04:38

And they weren't entirely wrong about that. It was the end, but it wasn't the end of the cosmos as they were saying.

04:46

It was the end of the old covenant and it was exactly as Jesus said that it was going to be in Matthew 24.

04:53

But instead of receiving the true Messiah's judgment on apostate

04:59

Judah and instead of listening to his prophecy, well they got things a little bit sideways.

05:06

They mistook the Gentile Roman armies for Gog and Magog and they got annihilated.

05:13

Plain and simple that it wasn't the second coming, although they thought it was, it was just a delusion where they dressed it up in some kind of spiritualized discernment and the

05:23

Romans obliterated them. And there's going to be a theme throughout this episode where many people, had great ideas.

05:31

They had the best intentions. They had all of this data that they showed and they, it just turned out bad.

05:38

So as the centuries progressed, so did the insanity. In year 365 there was a man named

05:45

Hillary of Poltiers who was a respected bishop and he was a theologian and he declared with absolute certainty that the very end of the world was going to happen in 365 a

06:00

D. He didn't give any parables or metaphors. He just, he just gave some raw date stamped doom that the earth was going to end, but it didn't end.

06:11

But Hillary did. He came to his end and nothing happened. And fortunately his brand of eschatological over -competence became the kind of zombie like apocalyptic bad exegesis that refused to die and continued to wonder its way through church history.

06:30

Now shortly after that, a man named Martin of Tours assured his disciples that the antichrist had already been born, that he was getting ready to rise to power.

06:39

He was on the verge of stepping out into the light because as Martin put it, the spirit of the age was, was, was really strong in that time and, and he just, he looked around and he looked at his situation.

06:52

He said, Oh, this must be the end of the world. I can guarantee you that the antichrist is coming and, but it didn't happen and nor should we be surprised because Martin forgot to look at revelation one seven in its context and because he didn't look at it in his context, he looked at it in his context and because he looked at it in his context, he looked around and he saw the world was getting worse according to his standards and he said the antichrist must be upon the horizon and he wasn't.

07:21

Now, a couple of hundred years later, the prophetic trifecta of the sixth century happens.

07:28

There was three men, Hippolytus, Julius Africanus, and even the venerable Aaron Neo.

07:35

So I don't know how to pronounce his name, but they attempted to crack the second coming code again, not by examining

07:42

Christ's warnings to first century Judah, not by looking at Matthew 24 in its context or revelation one and seeing that it was soon near quickly getting ready to happen.

07:50

No, no. They decided that a better hermeneutic to try to understand the end of the world would be to look at the dimensions of Noah's Ark and then apply it to the end of the world, which you've heard that correctly.

08:06

I have no idea why they thought that would be a good idea. So they, they took the cubit measurements of the pre flood boat and they looked at it as some kind of allegory for the stage of world history that would lead into its demise.

08:22

And then they got some kind of formula for how this was going to in the 600s end with God bringing another worldwide judgment.

08:35

This is what happens when you treat biblical typology and biblical, just biblical text, likes like it's some kind of Da Vinci code that instead of it being the inspired word of God, this is what happens when you treat the

08:50

Bible like it's a mystery code that you need to decode with your little decoder ring.

08:56

You end up, you end up taking the dimensions of the Ark and, and then using that as an interpretive code for the end of the world.

09:05

I wish that I, I might not make it through this episode without at least hurting my ribs from laughing because this is dumb.

09:14

The Bible is what it is. It says what it says in, in these types of ways of thinking are just wrong, but things get even weirder.

09:23

On April six, seven 93 a Spanish monk named Beatus of Labana gathered the faithful and declared with apocalyptic certainty that this was the day of the

09:35

Lord and people started weeping. They started praying, they started confessing their sins, which is a good thing.

09:42

And then pilgrims started flooding into the churches and, and the, and they, they waited for the end of the world.

09:49

And as they waited, the stars stayed in their places. The earth kept spinning and by sunrise, the only thing that Beatus had successfully ushered in was another round of egg on the church's face.

10:07

Not because he was an atheist, not because he hated scripture, but because he was a

10:13

Bible believing futurist who treated this passage not like it was applying to the first century people, which it was, which we've proven, which we'll continue to prove.

10:24

But he, he took it out of its context and put it into his. And when you do that, you get it wrong and you don't just get it a little wrong.

10:31

You get it way wrong. He brought this text into his cultural moment, his cultural chaos, instead of into the covenantal timeline of the book.

10:41

And when you do that, and like I said, you get it wrong. And still all of that was just a warmup act for the biggest church flop in the first thousand years.

10:52

And that was why one K not white two K Y one K. What is Y one K? Well, it's actually not a phrase.

10:58

I just made that up, but it is, it is the Y one K event. So as the year 1000 approached, apocalyptic fever was sweeping across Europe like a wildfire.

11:10

And the logic was compelling, at least to the medieval minds. A thousand years has got to mean something.

11:15

A day is like a thousand years, a thousand years like a day. Oh my goodness. World is going to end at the year 1000.

11:24

And then when they looked at the calendar and they saw that good Friday and the feast of annunciation both landed on the same day, which is a rare liturgical moment.

11:35

I said, this must be the end of the world. The doomsdayers were saying that this is the final countdown

11:46

Pope Sylvester. The second fan to the flames, pilgrims flooded Jerusalem.

11:51

Monks were issuing their last rights because people were getting ready to go, but it was getting ready to happen.

11:57

The end of the world was coming. People sold everything and they gathered together in churches and they waited for midnight because at midnight, the trumpet was going to blast the skies.

12:08

We're going to open clouds. We're going to, we're going to usher in the return of the Messiah.

12:13

The King was going to come. And then the church bells rang and instead midnight came and it went just like every other night before no flash, no fury, no

12:27

Messiah, just silence. And then you have to think all of the people who sold their houses to hang out inside that church that night.

12:34

We're probably really mad. Why'd you say this is going to be into the world.

12:40

You're the pastor. You're the teacher. You're the one who got your Bible degree. Why'd you say that?

12:47

And here's what happens. Whenever a false prophecy happens, the pastors get together.

12:55

The church gurus get together. The end time charlatans get together and they look at those poor folks who sold everything they had.

13:03

They look at them right in the eye and they move the goalpost. Instead of taking ownership, they just kind of move quietly into the background and change their theory, which happens over and over and over again in church history, being moved quietly in the background.

13:24

Now what ties all of these failures in the first thousand years together? Well, one fatal misstep and a very obvious one and a very easy one to discern.

13:33

They read, behold, then he is coming with the clouds and they assumed that it was about them, not about Jerusalem, not about the first century people, not about the covenant judgment on the old

13:46

Testament peoples, not about that. And when they read that, that it's about those who pierced him, they're going to be the ones who see him.

13:54

They thought, nah, that, that means me. They believed that it was about their generation, their cathedrals, their political crises, their celestial calendars and their popes and papers.

14:11

They didn't read Zechariah 12. They didn't read Matthew 24. They didn't read revelation one, at least not seriously.

14:18

They read it mystically. They read it mythically. They read it mathematically, but they didn't read it plainly.

14:26

And that's the problem. That's the problem in all, all of these failed predictions. They did not read it biblically because if they had, they would have seen it plain as day.

14:37

The ones who mourned were the people who pierced him. The ones who mourned were the tribes of the land, not the tribes of Europe because Europe doesn't have tribes.

14:49

They were the ones, the ones who saw him, the ones who pierced him, the ones who lived in the

14:55

Judean tribal allotment, not Latin bishops, not lighting candles, not Gothic sanctuaries.

15:01

The judgment wasn't cosmic. It was covenantal. It was local. It had already come.

15:10

And yet they were turning over every rock, trying to find something that's already happened. Instead of repenting for their failed forecast, the church codified these failures into custom and just continued it and just continued it for the next thousand years, which we're going to talk about now.

15:30

Instead of learning their lesson, instead of repenting, they continue to predict the end of the world and it became a kind of ritual that happened again and again and again and again.

15:41

And now we're going to talk about part two, the next 500 years.

15:49

Now, if the first millennium was a comedy of errors, the next 500 years we're going to be a full blown apocalyptic circus.

15:57

The faces changed, but the script didn't. The timeline remained warped.

16:03

The theology remained bankrupt and the misreading of revelation one seven torn from its covenantal moorings continued to fuel hysteria, guilt and a marketplace of speculative fiction.

16:16

After why one K meltdown after it fizzled into its anti -climax, well, you'd think that the church would have learned her lesson, but instead of repentance, she reinvented the error.

16:29

If Jesus didn't return in 1000 then surely he would return in 1033 because that's a thousand years after his crucifixion, or at least if you count his crucifixion in 33

16:44

AD, imagine the little people that got together and they said, I know what we did wrong.

16:51

We picked the year 1000 but he didn't die in year zero. He died in year 33.

16:58

How could we have been so silly? He's going to come back in 1033 and the logic kind of seemed airtight to them.

17:08

It was based off mysticism and numerology and everything else, but they said Jesus died 33 count a thousand years on that 1033 what could go wrong?

17:19

They had the best of intentions and the monastic interpreters even appealed to Psalm 90 saying a day is like a thousand years and they turned it into an apocalyptic stopwatch because obviously the risen king of glory governs redemptive history by sentimental anniversaries.

17:38

Jesus up in heaven saying, what am I going to do for my 1000 year anniversary?

17:43

I know I'm going to return when that prophecy flopped and it did because we're still here.

17:55

The eyes of Europe turned upward instead of looking at the text and instead of repenting.

18:01

Instead of doing that, they started staring at the skies so that every comment, every eclipse, every planetary alignment that happened, they said, this must be the end of the world and they continue to do this pretty much ever since.

18:17

And in that sense, nothing was safe from being spun into some court, some sort of in time scenario.

18:24

For instance, in 1186 a forged document known as the Toledo document predicted that a rare planetary alignment was going to ignite

18:35

Armageddon and that message spread like wildfire. Cities empty churches filled.

18:42

Wealth was liquidated. You see a pattern here. Prayers were poured out like rain and the result drum roll, nothing.

18:53

There was maybe some interesting tidal waves or tides that happened in the, in the, in the moment with all these eclipses and stuff are happening, but nothing happened.

19:02

The church got more egg on her face and that's it. But this is a recurring theme in this episode.

19:10

The lunacy wasn't finished because the black death arrived in the 14th century in Europe and one third of Europe perished, which was bad enough.

19:22

But on top of that, why wouldn't this be the end of the world? Maybe that's what they were thinking.

19:27

It was a really bad time in their lives. I get it. They said, this must be the end of the world. This surely must be how revelation is going to unfold.

19:37

Prophets were taking to the streets at this time. Preachers were thundering about the bowls and the seals and entire sects of people had formed in the streets, whipping themselves in the back, hoping that if they could harm themselves enough, then they would get the notice of God and God would not.

19:56

God would not finish them off with the antichrist or whatever they were saying. There were

20:01

Jewish communities at the time who were scapegoated and slaughtered by believers, by Christians, because they were accusing them of triggering the end by poisoning their, their wells.

20:15

The Jews at the time were poisoning their wells and the Christians were saying that you're trying to set off Armageddon.

20:22

So they killed them. But here's the truth. Revelation never predicted a pandemic in the middle ages.

20:29

It also never predicted middle -aged Christians and Jews were going to be at odds with one another.

20:36

It did predict that first century Jews and first century Christians would, would be in a kind of a head -on collision as the

20:45

Jews were punished for their apostasy and their rebellion. But the plague, the death, the black plague, you know, all of that, that wasn't a seal.

20:55

Of anything. It was a tragedy. Yeah. And it, but it did reveal how far the church had gone in its exegesis.

21:04

They were willing to look at any tragedy as a sign of the end. And that didn't stop because when the black plague hadn't convinced them that the world was going to end, while the

21:14

Mongols did as Genghis Khan's empire thundered through the east, eschatological imaginations were running wild.

21:24

Was he the antichrist Genghis Khan? Was he the Gog and Magog was the

21:29

Euphrates river drying up? No one at all consulted with Zechariah to figure that question out.

21:37

No one consulted with Matthew 24. No one consulted with a revelation one, at least not rightly.

21:44

Everyone consulted their feels and feelings lied by the 15th century in the end time.

21:53

Predictions had become a full blown ecclesiastical theater show. Priest gave homilies with tearful eyes and trembling voices warning that the

22:06

Pope was the beast or that the fall of Constantinople in 1453 was the breaking of the sixth seal.

22:15

And yet again, the sky didn't split open. No horsemen galloped out of the clouds.

22:21

No king appeared in the sky. Only another generation of bad hermeneutics scaring the peasant people into submission and selling all their stuff.

22:34

And after all of it, every ounce of it was rooted in a very simple and yet fatal error.

22:42

They read, behold he is coming with the clouds and they said, that's about me. They forgot that it was spoken to Jerusalem.

22:50

They ignored the original audience. They erased the context. They erased the words that those who pierced him and they said,

22:59

Oh, I, that's me. I did that. I'm the one who pierced him. They mistook the mourning of the tribes of the land for their

23:07

Austrian monks. I don't know where they got that from. They thought that the judgment of the old covenant was still pending when it had already actually thundered to its conclusion in 80 70 why?

23:20

Because they did not want the second coming to be fulfilled. They wanted it to be in their lifetime.

23:25

They wanted that moment so that they would be the generation that was special, that they, that their spectacle, their story, their, their moment, it would be theirs.

23:36

But when fulfillment is tethered to the covenant instead of to the headlines, when it's tethered to the text instead of to your context, well, you get the right answer instead of all of this weird speculation that we've seen all throughout church history for more than 15 centuries so far.

23:59

And I, and I'm, I'm honestly just highlighting a few examples. I don't have time to talk about all of them.

24:04

There's thousands of failed prophecies in church history. I'm just highlighting some that I think are fun.

24:10

But for more than 15 centuries, the church has kept replaying the same old game, the same tape mistaken, the already fulfilled for what is almost happened, taking what was in context in the first century and bringing it into their world and their time and their speculations.

24:34

And they've turned history into a kind of spiritual groundhog day of prophetic panic.

24:40

And that leads us to part three, the 16th century.

24:48

If the first thousand years was marked by passive panic in the next 500 years by peasant hysteria, well, the 16th century introduced a new kind of Tom foolery.

25:01

The reformers rightly recovered the gospel. Yes. And amen. But many of their followers treated the book of revelation like it was a sniper rifle against the

25:10

Catholic church. Once the papacy began selling indulgences like spiritual raffle tickets, well, it didn't take long for the

25:18

Protestants to begin pamphlets hearing the declaration that the Pope is the beast of revelation.

25:25

He's the Antichrist. Forget about the 10 horned dragon and apocalyptic horsemen and the, and all of that.

25:32

The real villain, they said, wore a miter and he swung the incense around and he sat on the seven hills of Italy.

25:40

Now let's be clear. The papacy was a real problem. It was corrupt to the core and it was tyrannical and it needed to be opposed because it opposed the doctrine of justification by faith with a vengeance.

25:52

So it needed to be opposed. But here's where the line got crossed.

26:00

Revelation one seven is a judgment against apostate

26:05

Judah. That passage was ripped from its time stamped context again and stapled to every ecclesial enemy that the

26:18

Protestants dreamt up. The Pope became the very man of sin, the man of lawlessness.

26:24

The Vatican was Babylon. The reformation was the trumpet clarion call that ushered in the end of time.

26:31

All of this was interpretive chaos. People counted years from the fall of Rome.

26:38

Others charted timelines from Constantine's edict. Everyone had a theory and everyone had a calendar and no one had a clue.

26:48

And then that's the Protestant version. Then you get to the Anabaptist version and it is crazy.

26:57

In the town of Moonster, I think I'm pronouncing that right. The Anabaptists weren't content to write little angry pamphlets like the

27:05

Protestants were. They fancied themselves prophets. They declared that Christ would return in their lifetime, that a new

27:14

Jerusalem would rise out of their city and that they were the chosen ones, the ones who were chosen to usher in this new covenant kingdom.

27:24

So they seized the city of Moonster by force. And the first thing that they did was they legalized polygamy because I don't know, maybe, maybe that's how you usher in the kingdom is by men having more than one wife.

27:39

I don't get it. And then they crowned a new messianic King and they armed themselves for Armageddon and spoiler alert, it didn't actually go very well at all.

27:52

The Catholics and the Protestant armies joined forces for once. And then they came in, they starved the city and they executed everyone.

28:02

And they hung the Messiah figure in an iron cage publicly so that everyone could see his body rotting in public so that they would never do that again.

28:14

And in fact, you can still go to the city of Moonster and you can see the cage still hanging today, rusted over and empty for sure.

28:21

But it's a silent rebuke to anyone who would try to say that the kingdom would come in the way that they said that the kingdom would come.

28:29

Now, what was their error? What was the novel thing that made them go wrong?

28:34

Well, same thing as always. They didn't get the timing of revelation, right? They, they got the audience wrong.

28:41

They, they read every, I shall see him. And they thought it meant them, not the ones who pierced him, not the tribes of Judah, but them in the 16th century in Europe.

28:57

They turned a first century judgment on apostate Israel into a 16th century holy war against Rome.

29:04

And the result wasn't revival. It was ruined. But again, the legacy didn't stop because guess what?

29:12

In the year 1 ,666 the number of the beast, that number alone was enough to, to trigger in time speculators galore.

29:25

And London, the town was ravaged by plague and fire in the year 666.

29:31

So, so churches were thundering with sermons about this must be the beast pamphlets, pamphlets,

29:39

Protestant and their pamphlets predicted the end of days. Rumors flew all over the place.

29:45

The antichrist had arrived in London of all places of London because Paul, when he was writing about, about the man of sin and when

29:57

John was writing about the antichrist and when revelation was writing about the beast, they were thinking about London and then everybody was waiting for the trumpets to sound and the city of man was about to fall to the ground.

30:15

And then they were waiting for smoke to start happening and for the smoke to clear and the city to be rebuilt and Christ to come again and set up London as a new

30:27

Jerusalem. And it didn't happen again and again and again and again.

30:38

And again, 16 centuries prove one overwhelming thing.

30:47

When men use revelation as a mirror for their own political enemies and for their own time period in their own context, they get it wrong when they read coming with the clouds as a forecast of the cosmic storm that is brewing in their time.

31:07

Then they always shoot in the wrong direction. They always miss. Yes, the papacy was corrupt.

31:13

Yes, Rome needed reform. Yes, London is a terrible city. I'm just kidding.

31:19

But the second coming has already occurred, not in Europe, but in Jerusalem, not at the end of the world, but at the end of the old covenant age, every false prediction in this era from 1000 or from zero until 1600, all of them are poisoned by this view that revelation speaks about our time and not theirs.

31:48

And the refusal to see what already happened in the past has led to two or to 16 centuries of church paranoia and false predictions.

32:02

And now that takes us to part four 17th century.

32:09

Now by the 1600s, the church had been wrong about the second coming for over a thousand years and over hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times.

32:19

But instead of repenting, she reloaded, she put the bullet back in the gun and shot it again and again and again and again.

32:27

And again, the failed prophecies didn't humble her. Why would they humble her? Let's, you know, why would they make her repent?

32:35

Why would they make her humble? They just hardened her and she needed that. She needed to prove that she was committed, that she was ready to go down to the grave with this sort of failed eschatological mumbo jumbo to technical term, which means lunacy because out of all of this, if history proves anything, it's this when men tear revelation one seven out of its first century roots and they try to duct tape it into their world and into their new cycles.

33:08

Well, they won't get anything right. Everything that they say will be wrong because it will be, it's already been fulfilled.

33:16

And in the 17th century, for instance, they believed some of the dumbest things yet that have ever been written in ink.

33:24

It began with London, London astrologers after their 1524 doomsday deluge failed to materialize.

33:33

They simply moved to a new date by a hundred years. Surely they said

33:38

February the first 1624 would bring about a new kind of flood. People panic. Boats were built, prayers were offered and the skies remained dry and the profits just changed the dates again.

33:50

They rebranded, they recalculated, but nothing happened, but they weren't alone in the

33:57

Jewish world. Sabotage Zevi a mystic rabbi with a flair for the dramatics proclaim that the

34:04

Messiah would come in the year 1648 when that didn't happen. He revised it to the year 1666 we've already talked about this year already because as we know, 666 has to mean something terrifyingly awful because it's three sixes in a row and it's, and it must mean something awful.

34:24

Well, okay. Tens of thousands of people followed this Jewish rabbi. They sold their homes, they quit their jobs, they, they sang songs of deliverance hoping that the

34:36

Messiah was going to come. And then when the Ottoman empire, when the Ottomans came in and arrested them, they killed most of them.

34:44

And then Zevi himself did the unthinkable. He converted to Islam to save his own skin.

34:52

So he needs all these people, tens of thousands of people into a false messianic view and then to save his own life, he converts to Islam.

35:00

Yeah. Cause he's the real lion of Judah. Even Christopher Columbus got in on the eschatological bingo game.

35:09

In his later years, the explorer wrote a strange little volume called the book of prophecies confidently proclaiming that the end of the world was going to happen in 1656 and when, and when the trumpet didn't sound, he just moved the date to 1658 because why stop at discovering the new world when you can miss the end of the world twice.

35:35

Meanwhile, theologians tried to do eschatology with algebra. Joseph Meade, a respected

35:43

Puritan scholar proclaimed that the antichrist appeared in 456 and that Christ would return in 1660.

35:53

It didn't happen. John Napier, the Scottish mathematician who invented logarithms, it's kind of a big deal.

36:02

He applied his mathematical genius to the book of Daniel and to the book of revelation. And we can imagine how that went for him.

36:09

He predicted that in the year 1688 or maybe 1700 because when exegesis fails, then long division will save you.

36:19

Anyway, he predicted it. It did not come true, but tell you what, the church is persistent.

36:27

She's going to keep going. She's going to keep trying to make revelation one seven into a future prophecy even if it kills her.

36:36

So what does she do? Well, the true madness of this era came from the fifth monarchists.

36:44

The radical Puritan sect believe that they were going to be the ones who ushered in Daniel's fifth kingdom, the stone that would crush all the others, because that's not about Jesus.

36:56

It's about these Puritan people. They claim that Christ's return was imminent, that they were going to be his sword bearing

37:05

Vanguard. And when he didn't show up, well, they gathered together and instead of repenting, they stormed the

37:13

British parliament with swords and it didn't end well. Well, their leader was captured and beheaded publicly.

37:23

Their movement collapsed and they were totally embarrassed and ended in defeat because building the kingdom by guessing dates and by swinging steel isn't just foolish.

37:36

It's blasphemous theater masquerading as theology. What united all of these disasters?

37:43

Again, same fatal flaw. Behold, he is coming in the clouds. Must be me.

37:49

Can't be Jerusalem. Can't be first century Israel. Can't be the ones who actually pierced him.

37:54

It must be us who metaphorically pierced him. They ignored the time text. They ignored the covenant context.

38:00

They ignored Christ's own words. They ignored it all and had they paused for a second and just ask the right questions.

38:09

Wait a minute. Who is the ones who pierced him? What generation is he addressing?

38:15

What tribes of the land were there and were mourning? If they would have done that, they would have seen it clearly.

38:24

The prophecy had already been fulfilled. And if they would have actually paid attention to 1600 1700 years of failed eschatological predictions that were actually looked in the landfill or the cemetery of Christian failed prophecies, they would have realized that no, this stuff didn't happen in 1666.

38:45

It happened in 80 70 when the son of man came in judgment on the temple, on the nation, on the old covenant world and against a group of people who rejected him, who murdered him and who killed his bride.

39:00

That's what it's all about. But they didn't ask. They just assumed and their assumptions gave birth to chaos.

39:09

Cults, cowardice, and plenty of comedy. The 17th century didn't just get it wrong.

39:16

It canonized failure. It binded that failure to the pulpits into the prayer meetings as if some kind of presumption were piety all because the church forgot to ask, what did

39:29

Jesus mean when he said soon, when he said near, when he said quickly, when he said close, when he said, don't seal up the words of this prophecy, what did he mean?

39:42

Well, he didn't mean them. He meant first century. He meant it not a metaphorical mystical metaphor of any generation of time who can put the pieces together.

39:55

He's a King and he kept covenant and he destroyed the covenant rebels.

40:01

And that leads us to part five, the 18th century.

40:09

Now the 18th century is known as the age of reason, but when it came to second comings of Christ, it was actually the age of irrationality, unrepentance and eschatological absurdity.

40:23

This was the century where the church faced with the rising tide of the enlightenment skepticism could have returned to scripture with sobriety.

40:33

They could have returned to scripture with covenant, so clarity, but instead, no, no, no. She doubled down and she doubled down hard on chart filled guesswork and she turned revelation again into a math puzzle which had eternal consequences.

40:52

While philosophers cast off the supernatural at an alarming rate, the doomsday prophets were clinging to the book of revelation like it was some kind of celestial magic eight ball.

41:03

And every time they shook that old eschatological eight ball, it showed up with the same phrase at the very top of it.

41:11

Jesus is coming soon. Coming soon. He's coming soon. He's coming soon. And they ignored that he already came in the first century and they injected all of this soonness into their timelines, into their headlines, into their context.

41:31

And they did what has been done for eight or 1700 years before them.

41:38

And they got it wrong just like they did. For instance, take William Whiston. For example, he's a brilliant mathematician who succeeded

41:45

Isaac Newton at Cambridge. So he's, he's really good. And one might expect such a man to be very cautious and reasoned and theological, restrained, but, but he wasn't.

41:57

In 1736, Whiston declared that a comment was going to collide with the earth and was going to usher in the day of judgment.

42:06

The day of the Lord. He was so persuasive that churches all across London, you start to see another little theme emerging here, by the way.

42:17

Not only are they misreading scripture, but a lot of errors coming out of London just saying hail the queen.

42:26

Whatever. Anyway, long live the queen, long live the queen or whatever. Anyway, the city of London was filled with weeping because of this brilliant mathematicians, mathematical formulas, wailing crowds were begging

42:40

God for mercy. And then the comment passed and it did not strike earth like William said it would.

42:50

Nothing happened. So Whiston, just like all the others before him updated his calculations because when your eschatology is based on astronomy instead of scripture, then you just keep adjusting it until you get what you want.

43:04

And the irony is he inherited Newton's chair, but he did not inherit

43:09

Newton's humility. And even though he was a false prophet, even though the

43:15

Bible says that we are to stone false prophets, he was not. He continued a very luck, a very lucrative career in mathematics at Cambridge university because we don't punish false prophets in the church.

43:30

We reward them for some reason. Here's another example. Meanwhile, in Germany, Johan Albrecht Bingle, a devout

43:39

Lutheran and a very serious scholar dove headlong into prophetic numerology, which will make you crazy.

43:47

And that's sort of what happened. He treated revelation like it was a cryptic calendar from God instead of or insisting that the end of the world was going to arrive in the year 1836 and he was really sure of it.

44:00

He knew it was going to happen. And his followers believed him and his books were circulated wildly.

44:06

And although he didn't live to see it fail, his methods planted the seeds of failure that would eventually become very fertile ground in American dispensationalism, soil charts, timelines, confident predictions all dressed up in just enough

44:25

Greek to make the people happy, happy, happy, happy. Across the

44:32

Atlantic, a new generation of preachers were taking all bricks methodology and methods and they were using those not to proclaim

44:41

Christ crucified, but to speculate about Christ calendar and his return.

44:46

They stopped being heralds of what had come and instead became interpreters of what had not come.

44:53

The gospel took a backseat to these trends, to these forecasts. Nevermind that Christ had already come in judgment and already told the generation that pierced him that they were going to be the ones that mourned over him.

45:06

Nevermind that revelation one seven had been fulfilled when the temple fell, when the old covenant collapsed, when the feast was put away, when the priesthood was put away.

45:14

Nevermind that the kingdom had already been advancing now for 1800 years, like leaven through a lump of dough.

45:20

Nevermind that, that, that, that the kingdom was growing like the little pebble that was going to fill the entire world. These men, these men knew what they were talking about.

45:28

What they didn't know was exegesis. They were reading tea leaves and entrails and they were calling it theology and they were wrapping it up in, like I said earlier, just enough

45:37

Kona Greek to tickle people's feet. All the while the enlightenment scholars who were now rapidly running away from God were mocking them because of their chicanery and stupidity.

45:52

And they weren't mocking them because they had better theology. They didn't. They were mocking them because they saw how outlandish and stupid the church was being in these prophecies.

46:01

And they said, this is ridiculous. And they ran away from God. The church predicted imminent judgment that never came.

46:10

The philosophers predicted inevitable utopia, which also never came and both were wrong.

46:17

One was wrong because they twisted the Bible. The other was wrong because the, because they ignored the Bible. But the ultimate irony is this, the very century that claimed to worship logic and to be the enlightened generation was the generation that systematized prophetic failure, comments, timelines, stargazing, astronomical alignments, everything except the actual biblical context was considered.

46:46

They had reason. Yes, but not the reason that God requires a heart bowed low before the text eyes fixed on Christ in a mind anchored in covenant clarity.

46:57

So once again, the church looked to the heavens, predicted their judgments, inherited their humiliations.

47:04

And once again, instead of repenting, she just recalculated, she just rerouted, you know, like when you're driving in your car and you take the wrong turn and it says rerouting, that's all the church has been doing spinning around in circles for 2000 years saying that, you know,

47:20

Jesus is going to come back in our generation. And every day she said that in every generation, maybe it's time that we look at what the text is actually saying instead of continuing to repeat the mound of broken prophecies that have preceded us.

47:34

Maybe just maybe, maybe it's time that the church refuses to, uh, to believe that soon doesn't mean soon.

47:42

Maybe it's time for us to believe what Jesus said and just believe his word that it's going to happen in a generation. And it did.

47:47

Maybe we should focus more on the mission instead of speculation. Maybe we should focus more on, uh, making or reading the

47:56

Bible as it really is, instead of trying to make it say what we want it to say. Maybe we should focus more of our effort on trying to bring the world under the dominion of Christ instead of trying to escape the world on a rocket with Christ.

48:08

Maybe just maybe. And that leads us to part six, the 19th century.

48:16

Now that the 17th century gave us the math and the 18th century gave us the mood.

48:22

The 19th century gave us the movement, a full blown tent revival, tears, soaked chart waving

48:29

Ascension robe wearing eschatological frenzy, complete with fevered preachers and what may be the most humiliating failure in all of church history.

48:41

His name was William Miller. He was a farmer and a Baptist preacher who after a few calculations in the book of Daniel, this has happened before.

48:51

And after a complete disregard for Matthew 24, he announced that Jesus was going to return sometime between March 21st, 1843 and March 21st, 1844.

49:02

He gave a 365 day window. And when nothing happened, he did what everyone else does.

49:10

He recalculated, he recalculated to October the 22nd, 1844. And this time he said that the math was airtight.

49:18

It was right this time. It was definitely, probably most assuredly going to happen.

49:24

And then tens of thousands of Americans believed him. They sold their land. They left their crops in the field to be harvested by someone else.

49:33

They sold white Ascension robes and they stood on the top of rooftops and their eyes were fixed upon the heavens.

49:39

And they were waiting for the sky to split open. And then guess what happened? Nothing. Midnight came and nothing happened again.

49:51

And this wasn't just a disappointment. It was labeled by history as the great disappointment.

49:59

It was a name so infamous that it should have been stamped across the forehead of every generation that insists that soon means eventually.

50:07

And then this generation means some future people at some point we have not met.

50:13

But the embarrassment like always didn't kill the movement.

50:20

It just baptized it. Some of Miller's followers claim that Christ had come, but he had only came invisibly spiritually.

50:32

Others said that judgment had already started, that it started in heaven and that it's going to soon trickle down to the earth.

50:38

And the result was a fractured mosaic of brand new sex of people who would become people like the

50:48

Jehovah's witnesses and the seventh day Adventist along with a host of other apocalyptic offshoots, each one retooling the same failed scheme over and over and over again with fresh fonts and new fervor.

51:01

Instead of sackcloth and ashes, they built new denominations. Instead of repentance, they launched new movements.

51:07

And after all in a culture that worships a fresh start and reinvention, what's one more failed apocalyptic dud between friends, right?

51:16

But let's be clear. None of this would have happened if anyone in the first, you know, 18 1900 years of church history would have just read revelation one at face value in its original timeframe.

51:31

Behold, he is coming with the clouds. And we'll talk about what that means next week. Again, if they would have seen that for what it really meant instead of a placeholder for American revivalism, then all of these shenanigans would not have happened.

51:43

But they didn't see it that way. And all the shenanigans did happen. And because of that Daniel 70 week prophecy stretched like Laffy Taffy across the centuries.

51:53

And that leads us to part seven, the 20th century.

51:59

Now, by the time the 20th century arrived, false prophecy wasn't an embarrassment any longer.

52:06

It was an empire. The pulpit gave way to the printing press. The doctrine gave way to the drama.

52:11

Instead of repensing for nearly 2000 years of prophetic failure, if evangelicals installed stage lighting, they sold tickets and they turned the second coming into a spiritual theme park where fear sold better than faith and fiction replaced exegesis.

52:29

And the man who lit the fuse on that little firecracker was C I Scofield. His 1909 reference

52:38

Bible didn't just footnote the text. It rewired the church's understanding of eschatology with a few cleverly placed comments here and there.

52:48

Scofield introduced an entirely new theology. The church he claimed was a parenthesis in God's plan.

52:57

Christ was not currently reigning in revelation one seven. Well, you know the deal. It's still waiting fulfillment.

53:03

Suddenly the phrase, behold, he is coming with the clouds. Doesn't mean judgment upon Jerusalem. It means a secret rapture, a global Antichrist and a bloody countdown in the

53:14

Middle East. A covenantal prophecy became a geopolitical horoscope. And then came the cold war with mushroom clouds looming upon the horizon and the iron curtain falling.

53:27

The church didn't run to the scriptures. She ran to the headlines. Every tremor in world politics began or became a trumpet blast.

53:37

Russia was Gog. The United Nations was Babylon. Bar codes were the mark of the beast.

53:43

Satellites were how every single eye on earth was going to see him instead of seeing revelation as redemptive history.

53:52

The church turned it into an evangelical Zodiac looking for the stars and not the signs.

53:59

Not in Christ, not in his victory, not in all of that, but in when is the defeat going to happen?

54:07

And the man who sold that and peddled that fear best was a man named Hal Lindsey.

54:14

In 1970 he released the book, the late great planet earth, a book so riddled with failed predictions that it were that it reads like a reverse miracle.

54:26

Lindsey claimed that the generation that saw Israel become a nation in 1948 was the generation that Jesus was talking about that would not pass away.

54:36

So he looked at Matthew 24 and he said, okay, that's the generation that Jesus is talking about.

54:41

So what you do is you take 1948 yet 40 years to that. And that means that Jesus is going to return by 1988 he was wrong.

54:54

Millions followed him anyway and he made millions. This is during a time period where if you want to be rich, then you just write about the end times.

55:02

His book sold over 35 million copies, not because he was right, but because it was terrifying.

55:09

You see in the 20th century, fear wasn't just tolerated. It was monetized by publishing companies.

55:16

So if you could scare people into believing that you had the clue to the end times fiasco, well, you'd make a lot of money on that.

55:24

In a similar way, in 1988 former NASA engineer, Edgar Weisenaut released his famous book, 88 reasons why the rapture will happen in 1988 he mailed it out to three, he mailed out 300 ,000 copies to pastors all over the country and he filled churches with canned food and countdown clocks.

55:47

And when Jesus failed to arrive in 1988 he did what everybody does.

55:53

He just revised his calculations. He said, I forgot to carry a one. I forgot to do my long division.

56:01

What I meant to say was that it's 89 reasons that the rapture is going to happen in 1989 and mama was wrong again.

56:14

But by then the damage was already done. The church had stopped demanding accuracy.

56:20

The church didn't even care. False prophecy was no longer a cause for repentance. It was just the setup for the next sequel.

56:28

Didn't matter if it was right. Didn't matter if, if it actually said things that were true, didn't matter. It just mattered if it was interesting.

56:36

It mattered if it made a, a guess at it. It mattered if it tried. It was the participation trophy era of eschatological studies.

56:45

You tried, you did your best. We believed you. We gave you money. That leads us to sort of the crescendo of all of this tomfoolery, which was the left behind sequel written by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B Jenkins.

57:04

They published their blockbuster series in the 1990s and it wasn't just a story.

57:10

It became an eschatological catechism for an entire generation. It made millions and millions and millions of dollars.

57:18

Even got a movie from Kirk Cameron. Two -parter actually. They didn't make it very far in the series.

57:25

In this version of the second coming, Jesus doesn't come to judge the covenant breaking house of Israel.

57:31

No, he comes to rapture airline pilots away and to leave eyeglasses in empty pews and, and to let the antichrist run the

57:41

United Nations. Nikolai Carpathia is his name and it wasn't theology. It was like the

57:47

Schofield Bible meets Steven Spielberg. It was just enough scripture to, to let you know that maybe they knew what they were talking about, but it was just enough fantastic fantasy to keep you interested.

58:00

The tragedy wasn't just that they were wrong. It's that the church stopped caring if they were wrong.

58:07

False prophecy was no longer a disqualifying feature. It was marketable. Masked missed dates became updated editions.

58:17

Failed timelines became bestsellers. Heresy became a new brand and the cost.

58:23

Two generations of Christians were raised to believe that the world is constantly getting worse, but we have no idea how to speak about that accurately.

58:34

The kingdom is on hold, but all of our predictions have failed.

58:41

The church is an evacuation team, not in a victorious bride.

58:48

All of it. Every retreat is theology. Every doomsday chart was built upon the same fundamental assumption that revelation one seven was about us and not about them.

59:02

When it said, behold, he is coming with the clouds. It wasn't about the first century juice, but nuclear war.

59:11

That's what John meant in revelation. He wrote to seven churches, not about stuff they're going through, but stuff we're going through.

59:21

He was writing a trailer for the antichrist thriller that was going to happen in the 21st century.

59:28

It's not a covenantal warning that was speaking to real people in real time who received the letter.

59:35

It was for us. All of this was fulfilled in 80 70 when the son of man came in judgment just as he promised and he dismantled the old covenant and he enthroned his unstoppable kingdom.

59:53

But nobody preached that Schofield didn't preach that. Lindsay didn't print that.

59:59

Why is it not didn't calculate that? Lehay didn't imagine that. And so the 20th century became the most delusional and destructive and globally exported chapter of eschatological error in all of church history.

01:00:16

They weren't just mistaken. They were liars dressed up in study

01:00:21

Bibles and dramatized in paperback novels and swallowed by millions.

01:00:28

But the remedy for all of this foolishness is not silence. It's truth.

01:00:34

And the truth is this. Jesus has already came in judgment. The kingdom has already been inaugurated.

01:00:42

It's already been established and it's already advancing. And the church's task is not to escape, but to conquer.

01:00:49

I mean, think about it. Every century there was a false prophecy and yet the church is still here. And why are we here?

01:00:56

Are we here to continue speculating about a false ending that's never coming?

01:01:02

Are we here to build? Are we here to work? Are we here to see the kingdom of God advance until the entire world is filled with the glory of God?

01:01:11

Maybe after 2000 years of error, we will pull our sweet little head out of our sweet little tush and we'll get to work.

01:01:19

And that leads us to our conclusion. What have we witnessed here today?

01:01:27

Well, we've witnessed a dumpster fire. We've witnessed a train wreck. We've witnessed the cemetery of 2000 years of counterfeit, prophecy paraded as intelligence, but peddled as confusion.

01:01:43

We've witnessed a legacy of delusion that we've inherited like a family heirloom that nobody wanted, cherished only because no one was brave enough to throw it on eBay.

01:01:57

This isn't just bad theology. This is an anti gospel that's traded

01:02:03

Christ and his kingdom for timelines and headlines for traded the kingdom for bunkers, traded his victory for defeat, traded clarity for failed predictions and charts for centuries.

01:02:21

The church has stared at revelation chapter one verse seven and refuse to believe the obvious.

01:02:27

We took the word soon and we made it mean someday we took a prophecy aimed squarely at those who pierced him and smeared it across every generation of church history and said, nah, that applies to me.

01:02:44

It applies to us and we've paid for it. We've exchanged redemptive certainty for apocalyptic speculation.

01:02:53

We've surrendered dominion for despair. We've let fictional raptures replace historical redemption, but the text did not lie to us and the king never flinched.

01:03:05

These things must soon take place and they did. Jesus came just like he said he would not to destroy the cosmos, but to dismantle the old covenant corpse, the old covenant

01:03:16

Israel, not to cancel creation, but to crown his church, not to evacuate saints, but to establish a kingdom that will never end, that cannot be shaken, that will spread out until the entire world is filled with his gospel and his glory.

01:03:30

The temple fell. Yes, that old age ended. Yes. But the son of man came in the clouds of glory and judgment and now he reigns.

01:03:38

That's not hypothetical. That's not symbolic. That's not eventual. That's now.

01:03:45

And it means that we don't need, we don't need countdown clocks.

01:03:52

We don't need, we don't need charts. What we need is scriptural clarity.

01:03:58

We don't need prophetic prophecies of panic and doom. We need prophetic scriptural obedience.

01:04:06

Brothers and sisters, our king is not waiting for signs in the heaven.

01:04:13

He's seated in the heavens on his throne waiting for you and I to get to work.

01:04:20

He doesn't need your fear. He demands your faithfulness. He demands you to go, to give, to build, to plant, to disciple, to declare, to herald.

01:04:31

The mission of God is that we are here not to escape, but to expand his kingdom.

01:04:37

The goal is not retreat. It's reclamation. So stop checking the skies for clearance and start storming the gates of hell.

01:04:51

With confidence. Brothers and sisters, the church has had 2000 years of failed false prophecies.

01:05:00

And guess what's happened. The church has grown. Not because of the failed prophecies, obviously, but because Jesus Christ will build his church and the gates of hell will not stand against it.

01:05:10

And it's time that we wake up to that. And until next time,

01:05:17

I pray that God richly blesses you. I pray that you spread the message of his kingship far and wide.

01:05:24

I pray that you reject any of the lies of the eschatological doom and gloomeries. And I pray that wherever God has called you to, whatever family he's called you to, whatever church he's called you to, whatever job he's called you to, whatever house he's called you to, whatever town he's called you to, that in that place, you will build.